A clarification of my OP: My strong reaction to this news story was not out of fear for my own children (although I do what I can to keep them safe). However, I believe that being a parent makes you more sensitive to violence against ALL children.

Also, I should perhaps disclose that my political and moral beliefs place me in a tiny minority here on this forum. I am an extremely right-wing bible-thumping intolerant evangelical Christian, and believe that any sex outside of heterosexual marriage is a sin. I love it when murders and rapists get the death penalty and I do what I can to see that unborn babies live. I would live in Texas if it wasn't so darn hot. I can't stand organic food (I miss the pesticides and hormones). I'm a wild-eyed Jesus freak, and I try to live my life in complete obedience to the Bible. I get annoyed because Republicans (and the tea party) are not conservative enough for my tastes. I'm that annoying goody two-shoes church-brainwashed killjoy who condemns your fun and tells you that you need Jesus to save you from your sins.

To many of you, I am the very face of evil, much more horrifying than the pedophiles in the article above.

I started a thread about this "blitcoin" here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34383.0

From this article: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240039221/Black-Hat-2011-Dan-Kaminsky-reveals-network-security-research-topics


Anybody know anything about this supposed tool to unmask bitcoin users? Google search for "blitcoin"+kaminsty just returns two links to the article quoted above:

http://www.google.com/search?q="blitcoin"+kaminsky

That won't be true for long, but here is what I see:

If a weekend meetup occurs anywhere in the area, I'll try to attend at least once. Sadly, I'm way too busy to attend every week.

morpheus,

While pondering this topic this morning I suddenly realized there is a fatal flaw in your plan as stated. I'm very sad to have to point this out, because I really want something like this to work because it is so beautifully simple.

Your plan to destroy coins will not work as stated. You are right that destroying coins will give people incentive to not transfer them between wallets, but they will simply sell whole wallets loaded with coins instead. Once some people start doing this, anybody transferring the normal way will be at a disadvantage, and everyone will have to start doing it, then *poof* you completely lose all control over reducing the coin supply.

Personally, I have to return to pondering the hideously complex ideas in my proposal for the second bitcoin whitepaper for now, but I'm hoping you have a good answer for this because I liked your idea better.

Thanks. I think I've gleaned enough hits on this thread by trickery. New thread title is:

"Open letter to online exchanges and wallets: store coins offline!"

Here is the official statement from VirWox. I guess now we know why they never post here.


I fully understand and appreciate why sites don't want to discuss their security measures in detail, but I think it's a great way to build trust to be as transparent as possible.

Agree that statutory rape laws can be weird, with prosecutions of 19y/o with a 16y/o as almost happened to a relative of mine who got his girlfriend pregnant (he married her to avoid parents pressing charges, which didn't work out, as you can imagine). I'm not totally against laws like this, but they are more crimes of youthful foolishness, and they don't make me any more angry than other similar crimes (like graffiti tagging, for instance).

Read the articles about this case (if you can stomach it) these children were nearly infants in some cases, and were being tortured for the sexual pleasure of others. There's no comparison in the severity of these crimes to something like a consensual "statutory rape" crime, even if they are covered by the same or similar laws.

Have you ever read something that makes you so angry you can barely see straight?

One thing that always makes me blind with rage is sexual abuse of little kids. I'm a dad of two little ones, and stories like this make me ready to commit murder:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/child-porn-ring-put-kids-obvious-intentional-pain/story?id=14222833


I know this forum is frequented by some people who are very into privacy and freedom of speech, and consider this sort of "speech" an unfortunate evil which must be tolerated in order to obtain the capability for dissidents to speak out against repressive regimes.

However, from a morality standpoint, if you are aware of something like this going on, and you don't do your part to help put a stop to it, these children's blood and tears are on your head too.

Alternately, if you don't think justice can reach the perpetrator for some reason, I also approve of cold-blooded murder of these perpetrators. This is one case where a bitcoin-powered assassination market could actually do the world some good, although I doubt it would actually be used for purposes that noble.

Anyone defending child pornography as protected "speech" makes me sick. I can't imagine a punishment cruel enough for these guys. At the very least they should be killed.

</vent>

I try to comment on every bitcoin article that comes out in the news (annoying some people), and I include my tradehill code in my comments. So far that has netted me 82 referrals, most of whom do not trade most of the time. I make almost nothing from them, but I like supporting Tradehill because I think they are (currently) the best bitcoin exchange.

Most of my referral money actually comes from a couple of people on this forum who used my code to sign up when TradeHill first opened. They trade much more than I do. Total referral income recently cleared $30 USD, almost all of it in what appears to be a steady stream from those first couple referrals.

I recently asked TradeHill if all my boosting for them qualified me for the special "invitation only" low trading fees. I got a polite reply that they would be happy to grant me lower fees if I could clear $30k in trades a week! Apparently there are some MUCH bigger players out there!

This thread is now sticked (thanks SW). I'm hoping that this thread can help a few Newbies achieve the proper paranoia without having to earn it by losing coins.

Yes, I intentionally chose a thread title that sacrificed some accuracy in favor of being controversial and getting more people to read the thread. It's a bad habit of mine. One of many.

In order to make the title a teensy bit less misleading, I added quotes around "fractional reserve" in post #1.

Do you mind disclosing what % of britcoin/intersango funds are offline?

@Flexcoin, I request that you chime in on this thread about online wallets keeping offline reserves:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34011.0

Anyone thinking about creating or using an online wallet services should be thinking about offline reserves. See this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34011.0

Anyone thinking of developing or using an online wallet service should be thinking about offline reserves, as discussed here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34011.0

Anyone thinking of developing or using an online wallet service should be thinking about offline reserves, as discussed here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34011.0

It SHOULD be obvious I suppose, but from what I understand that Polish exchange (bitomat) lost everything! Some of that loss could have been avoided with a strategy like this.

Obviously this doesn't help if the bitcoin service is fraudulent (MyBitcoin?), but any bitcoin wallet service who wants some degree of legitimacy needs to be doing this.

MagicalTux: Any plans to allow individual users to move their coins offline as described above?

Yes, and spread around your risk so that you don't have a "single point of failure" where you can lose all your coins!

Every exchange and wallet services (or actually anyone running a service with lots of coins) should only keep only a fraction of their bitcoin reserves available for immediate withdrawal - just enough to provide day-to-day liquidity.

The bulk of coins should be stored in multiple encrypted offline wallets (with multiple backups and a nice big gap of air between these wallets and the internet). These offline coins would not be available for immediate withdrawal, but they would be safe!

Coins could be sent to the offline wallets any time, and coins could be returned to the pool of available coins manually as needed. The concept is analogous to a bank vault. Most of the cash at your bank is not sitting in the till in front of the teller, but is securely stored in a vault which can only be accessed at certain times under heavy security.

Perhaps you think this doesn't need to be said, but some services have already lost all their coins by not doing this!

I also think that users of any such site should also have the option of storing a fraction of their coins in such an offline wallet. You could even give each user their own "offline address" where they could securely store coins for the long term, and they could see the coins in block explorer. Bringing the coins back online would require extra verification steps and built-in delays. This is analogous to a safety deposit box, and you could even call it that.

I'm sending PMs to the exchange and wallet reps, asking them to comment on this thread.